R&D Offices: Go Ukraine 2017

Highly skilled and well-qualified developers, convenient geographical position, striving to growth, development and innovations, proficiency in English are among the major things that attract companies from all over the world to Ukraine when it comes to searching for specialists. Now, Ukraine is the top outsourcing destination in Eastern Europe with the largest number of IT developers.

The presence of R&D centers of global giants like Samsung, Oracle, Microsoft, Google, Boeing, Siemens, IBM and many others proves the fact that the bright Ukrainian minds are in great demand. Moreover, the development rates in particular and salary expectations, in general, are considerably lower in Ukraine than in the USA and Western Europe, and the taxes are lower as well, so opening an R&D center in Ukraine is definitely a win-win solution.

In this article, we’ll tell you about the companies who opened their R&D centers in Ukraine in 2017 and about the benefits they received consequently.

Mellanox Technologies, an American producer of network equipment, announced that they will open their first R&D center in Ukraine. Prior to deciding to open the R&D center, the company had successful experience of work with Ukrainian partners and made sure that this country has a great potential. The company now has offices in the USA, Israel, Denmark, U.K., Singapore, Japan, China, Taiwan. All in all, there are nearly 3 000 employees working for Mellanox worldwide. As the vice-president of the company told, Mellanox is going to hire 100 people in Kyiv in the following two years. The first steps have been already made. Now, Mellanox Kyiv R&D is looking for the most varied specialists in Ukraine to work on top technologies and deal with advanced engineering challenges.

Early this year, a Sweden-based company Ericsson AB, which manufactures and markets radio and television communication equipment, announced that they decided to open the first R&D center in Ukraine as well. The center is built on the basis of a branch of a Ukraine-Polish IT-company Ericpol and is located in Lviv. As for now, about 120 developers already work in the office which was opened on April 20, 2017. Lviv R&D center will work on LTE, Internet of Things, e-health, and e-government. Ericsson AB considers opening more R&D centers in Ukraine over time.

Huawei, one of the largest manufacturers of smartphones and tablets in China, announced that the company decided to open an R&D office in Kyiv, Ukraine and hire 450 professionals to work for it. As for now, the company invests actively in consumer and enterprise electronics in Ukraine, so it’s no wonder that they decided to take a step further and establish a deeper relationship with this country’s bright minds. Some sources say that the Ukrainian R&D center will work on IoT solutions, but no official information was given by Huawei about it so far. The company is in the stage of active hiring as for now.

Ring Labs is the Kyiv R&D center of an American company Ring, that works in the sphere of home security. Ring’s most famous product is the Ring Video Doorbell, that revolutionized the notion of home security. The Ukrainian office works on the development of the software in the field of machine learning, computer vision, intellectual analysis of data and other spheres of AI. Training data of Ring Labs consists of millions of video and their work results are deployed to millions of devices worldwide. Working for Ring, Ukrainian professionals dive into the most advanced challenges of AI, IoT, Machine Learning and solve them!

As you can see, several global leaders turned their attention to Ukraine in 2017 and decided to make the most of the cooperation with Ukrainian developers by opening an R&D center in this country. As we’ve already written in this article on our blog, opening an R&D center in Ukraine has more benefits than simple outsourcing and pays off better in the long run.

If you are thinking about hiring Ukrainian developers for your project, we recommend to do it without delay, because with such a tendency, the demand can outreach the supply easily!